I get that eagles etc. have extremely high resolving vision, but I cannot comprehend, how just this perk allows them to see a rabbit or even a mouse from really high in the sky. If I am at the same hight with an equally high resolving camera I’d still have to use a huge camera lens to zoom at the mouse and thereby identify it as one. In my understanding, birds of prey have relatively small eyes with limited capability of “zooming” (focal length?), so how is this possible?
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Eagles don’t just see better, they also see very differently. For example, their eye has two points of focal clarity, compared to our single one.
In other words, our eye is designed to see best straight through the center of it, as if the outer surface of the orb was a lens (which it is, I’m just trying to paint the picture.) An eagle’s eye will have two such points, for a total of four points of visual clarity. That gives them exceptionally good depth perception and movement detection in addition to their far greater resolution.
So not only can they see a shape from further away, but they can also determine its 3D placement in the world with more accuracy and track movement more easily. And tracking movement is a big part of how they hunt – it’s not so much that they can clearly distinguish a rabbit from a rock when they’re a mile in the sky, as much as they can spot the movement pattern of the rabbit.
They see a distant shadow moving in a hopping zig-zag pattern, and they know it means food.
You might have noticed that rabbits will freeze when nervous – they do that for that reason – because they’re more likely to attract a predator by trying to run away from it.
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